Quote of the Day (James Reston, on Chappaquiddick)

"Tragedy has again struck the Kennedy family."— New York Times columnist James Reston, on the Chappaquiddick accident that killed Ted Kennedy’s passenger Mary Jo Kopechne on July 18, 1969, quoted in John F. Stacks, Scotty: James B. Reston and the Rise and Fall of American Journalism (2002)

Legendary journalist Reston was on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard when he was alerted to the discovery of the body of Mary Jo Kopechne off a Chappaquiddick bridge. The quote above was written as the lead of the story he phoned in, until wiser heads at the Times prevailed and drastically rewrote the piece.

Reston did not, of course, commit grammatical errors, nor even errors of fact. No, the issue was a lack of perspective that amounted to a moral failure (one that, admittedly, other newsmen committed, including a young Dan Rather, who pronounced the incident an example of “one tragedy after another for the Kennedy family”). The veteran Reston, a kind of father-confessor to distressed politicians (like President Kennedy after his disastrous Vienna summit with Khrushchev), never got around to naming Ms. Kopechne till the fourth paragraph.

The deaths of Joe Jr., Kathleen, Jack and Bobby Kennedy were, of course, tragedies that “struck” the rich, politically powerful Massachusetts family. But at Chappaquiddick, no member of the clan died. Ted Kennedy caused the death for a young woman unlucky enough to come into the family orbit.

Like Bill Clinton, another brilliant politician of matching recklessness, Senator Kennedy has benefited from a right wing so ready to pummel him against the ropes over every little thing that they exhaust themselves in the process. Their constant screeching over real and imagined sins by the senator has made it easy to ignore fleeting moments when they actually make sense.

From the moment the incident burst into the public eye until the end of Senator Kennedy’s Presidential run 11 years later, the establishment media speculated on what it foretold about how he would react in a crisis. The right wing painted a middle-aged roué, undone by the family weakness for broads and/or booze. Kennedy’s defenders excused the occurrence at the bridge as an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise sterling public career.

All three groups missed something essential about the midnight plunge off the bridge and the controversial events that followed—specifically, whether the treatment accorded the Senator met the standard of equality before the law.

In the 1962 primary campaign that launched him on his nearly half-century in the Senate, Ted Kennedy was told by his Democratic opponent, Eddie McCormick, “If your name were Edward Moore [rather than Edward Moore Kennedy], your candidacy would be a joke.”

The McCormick standard can apply here. If the name on his expired driver’s license had been Edward Moore rather than Edward Moore Kennedy, do you really think that Police Chief Dominick Arena would have been so deferential in not pressing him about why he had waited so long in notifying authorities about the event? If it had been your name on the license rather than Kennedy’s, do you think you could have expected similar courtesy from law enforcement authorities?

Let’s put this another way: What if Richard Nixon, not Ted Kennedy, had been behind the wheel of the black Oldsmobile sedan? Would Kennedy’s defenders so readily accept Nixon’s explanation for what happened that night? Or do you think they might have screamed “Cover-up!”?

(I write this as one who believed that Nixon defiled American politics from the moment he ran for public office, that he was a threat to the Constitution, and that his forced resignation was essential in holding him and future Presidents to account.)

What if the body submerged under water had been not Mary Jo Kopechne, but someone closer to you—a friend, a sister, a daughter? Could you shrug off the events of that night so readily?

It needs to be said: Nobody ends up in the legal and political jeopardy in which Kennedy found himself simply because of being in the company of an attractive young woman not his wife. Somebody ends up imperiled if the woman dies, if you made no serious attempt to get help immediately, and if enough time elapsed between the accident and the notification of authorities for you to sober up in a hurry and secure legal assistance.

A specious moral calculus exists in another sense concerning the fallout from the incident. Kennedy, we are told, has spent his subsequent career atoning for this unfortunate event. The massive amount of legislation he championed—the good he has done—outweighs any harm that befell to one unfortunate young woman.

Something interesting happened between 40 years ago and today. The shock of a Kennedy doing something legally actionable was such that many, if not most, Americans at the time couldn’t accept that possibility—and certainly not his Massachusetts constituents, who gave him overwhelmingly support after a televised address, in which he said he would abide by their decision as to whether or not he should stay in office.

Forty years on, I don’t know if anyone finds Kennedy’s explanation for his actions on that night credible. He himself called how he acted “irrational and indefensible and inexcusable and inexplicable.”

Conservatives, though loudest, have not been alone in decrying Kennedy’s conduct at Chappaquiddick.

The feminist Suzannah Lessard, in a much-discussed Washington Monthly article on the eve of his Presidential campaign, saw Chappaquiddick as part of a larger “case of arrested development, a kind of narcissistic intemperance, a huge, babyish ego that must constantly be fed.”

In his account The Last Kennedy, left-wing journalist Robert Sherrill (long associated with The Nation) called the aftermath of the accident “the most brilliant cover-up ever achieved in a nation where investigative procedures are well developed and where the principles of equal justice prevail, at least during some of those moments where people are watching.”

Let’s admit much, if not all, that Kennedy’s admirers claim in his defense (I, for one, don’t mind—most, maybe all, of the following is true):

* He has helped to pass more progressive legislation—immigration reform, civil rights, freedom of information, health care, environmental, and labor law—than virtually anyone else in the history of the Senate;

* Unlike brothers Jack and Bobby, he treated the Senate as an institution worth mastering rather than as a fast steppingstone to something bigger;

* In an increasingly partisan age, he became an indispensable bridge-builder to the GOP;

* He is a man of surpassingly good humor and loyalty who has even stayed for hours by the bedside of gravely ill friends;

* Particularly after his remarriage, to Victoria Reggie in 1992, he has acted with greater personal restraint.

And yet, after all of this, one has to reject the notion of him as the Lord Jim of the Senate, searching endlessly for atonement.

To start with, the contention of Kennedy’s supporters that he is a changed man implies that there was indeed something wrong with his conduct at Chappaquiddick.

But Kennedy’s statement only admits that he was dazed after the car went off the bridge. He has steadfastly denied being drunk, even though numerous witnesses described him as drinking from early on in the day.

Moreover, it is odd that Kennedy insisted on driving Kopechne back to her hotel room even though his own driver was present at the party and was available to drive her back. Other aspects of his story (e.g., his claim that there were no lights on at any cottage in the area) were contradicted by residents afterward.

The path to expiation, then, could start with a statement of the truth. But that has not been forthcoming and at this stage won’t be.

Second, Kennedy never renounced power, as did British cabinet minister John Profumo after his notorious scandal in 1963. The disgraced minister could have provided an alternative to how to live one’s life, post-scandal: quiet, continual charity work in London’s East End.

But in the end, power--his power, and his chances to exert greater power--mattered more to Kennedy than the truth.

Time allows people to put the actions of a life in a wider context, but it also runs the risk of making one forgetful. In Kennedy's case, his greater sense of personal responsibility in the last two decades has blinded many to what must be kept in mind when making any final assessment of his career: the double immunity he enjoyed as a member of a glamorous, wealthy, and powerful clan and as a member of a Senate that is constitutionally disinclined to call him to account because of their own multiple sins involving ego, abuse of authority, assumption of deference, and, of course, addictions to sex and drink.

Kennedy’s actions prevented him from reaching the Presidency that so many were predicting for him 40 years ago, but it did not lose him the office he already had. Many other politicians since then have been drummed out of their jobs immediately for far less egregious offenses.

Ted Kennedy lost his hopes for higher office 40 years ago, but Mary Jo Kopechne lost her life. In all the millions of words about the senator, so little remains known about the passenger in his car that night. But that is just another aspect of the same moral myopia that led Reston to believe that tragedy had struck the Kennedy family rather than the Kopechnes.